Recurring invoices that go out on schedule

What is a recurring invoice?

Some work is billed once. A lot of work is billed again and again for the same thing: a bookkeeping service every month, a website maintenance plan every quarter, a cleaning contract every week, a software licence every year. Writing those invoices by hand is repetitive and easy to forget, and a forgotten invoice is money that arrives a month late. Office cleaning and IT support often work this way; the cleaning invoice template and the IT services invoice template show typical monthly lines.

A recurring invoice turns that routine into a schedule. You describe the invoice once, with the client, the lines, the taxes, the currency and the payment terms, and then choose how often it repeats and when it should stop. Each period, a fresh invoice is produced from that template with its own number, issue date and due date. The client receives a normal invoice; nothing about it looks automated.

People sometimes use recurring invoice, retainer invoice and subscription billing as if they meant the same. They overlap but are not identical, and the difference affects how you set things up.

Recurring invoice, retainer invoice and subscription: the difference

Prima Invoice handles the first two directly. A retainer is simply a recurring invoice whose lines describe reserved time or capacity, paid before the work rather than after it. If the hours used exceed the retainer, you add the overage as a separate invoice or as an extra line when you review the draft.

Prima Invoice does not charge your client's card automatically. It sends the invoice, and the client pays it the usual way, by bank transfer or through your own Stripe or PayPal payment link. If you need cards charged without any action from the customer, that is a subscription feature of your payment provider, and Prima Invoice can still send the matching invoices for your records.

Setting up a schedule

A recurring schedule in Prima Invoice has a few settings, and each of them has a sensible default.

• Frequency: any interval from weekly to yearly, so weekly cleaning, monthly retainers, quarterly maintenance and annual licences all fit.
• Start date: the issue date of the first invoice in the series.
• End: never, after a set number of invoices (for example 12 monthly instalments), or on a specific date such as the end of a contract.
• Delivery: send automatically to the client by email, or save each new invoice as a draft so you can review it, adjust quantities and send it yourself.
• Payment terms: due on receipt, Net 7, Net 15, Net 30 or a custom period, applied to each new invoice so its due date is always correct.
• Pause and resume: stop the series while a client is on holiday or a contract is renegotiated, then continue without rebuilding it.

Each new invoice is created at 9:00 in the morning in the time zone saved in your business profile, which means your client in another country receives it at a predictable moment of your working day rather than in the middle of your night.

Month ends, leap years and daylight saving

Calendars are messier than they look, and recurring billing is where that mess shows up. A monthly series that starts on 31 January cannot land on 31 February. Prima Invoice moves such dates to the last day of the shorter month and returns to the original day as soon as the month allows it.

Daylight saving changes are handled in the same careful way. When clocks move forward or back, an invoice is still created once for its date, never twice and never skipped. This is tested with time zones such as Pacific/Auckland, where the change happens at different times of year than in Europe or North America.

One invoice per period, guaranteed

Behind the scenes, a scheduled worker checks every fifteen minutes for invoices that are due to be created, reminders that are due to be sent and emails waiting in the queue. Servers restart and jobs occasionally run twice; that is normal on the internet. What matters is that a rerun never produces a duplicate invoice.

Prima Invoice records each schedule and period with a unique key. If the worker runs twice for the same period, the second run finds the invoice already created and does nothing. Your client never receives the same monthly bill twice, and your numbering never jumps.

Numbers, reminders and statuses come along

Every invoice generated from a schedule is a full invoice in your account. It receives the next number in your sequence when it is finalised, such as INV-2026-0107, so the series fits in with your one-off invoices. It shows a status, from Sent through Viewed to Paid, in your invoice tracking list. And if it is sent by email with a due date, it gets the same automatic payment reminders as any other invoice: three days before, on the due date and seven days after, stopping when you record the payment.

Put together, a monthly client can be billed, reminded and marked paid with no manual step from you apart from recording the payment when it arrives.

Worked example: a monthly retainer

Imagine a small design studio that agrees a retainer with a bakery chain: brand support up to ten hours a month, plus print-ready artwork for seasonal menus. The studio charges a flat fee, invoiced in advance on the first day of each month, payable within fifteen days, with a 12-month minimum term. This is a hypothetical example to show the settings, not a customer story. The graphic design invoice template has lines for this kind of retainer.

Each month the draft appears at 9:00 on the 1st. If the designers worked twelve hours instead of ten, someone adds a line for two extra hours, sends the invoice, and the reminders take over. Twelve invoices later the series ends by itself, and a renewal conversation can start with the full billing history at hand.

Who uses recurring invoices

• Agencies and studios billing monthly retainers for design, content, advertising management or development support.
• Bookkeepers, virtual assistants and consultants with fixed monthly packages.
• IT service providers and web developers selling hosting, maintenance and support plans.
• Cleaning, gardening and pool companies with weekly or fortnightly visits.
• Tutors, coaches, music teachers and fitness trainers billing a set number of sessions each month.
• Landlords and small property managers invoicing rent or service charges on the same date every month, where an invoice is expected.

If your work varies from month to month, a recurring invoice can still help. Choose the draft option: the schedule prepares the invoice on time with the fixed lines filled in, and you only add the variable part, like extra hours or materials, before you send it.

Good practice for recurring billing

Recurring invoices save the most time when the agreement behind them is clear. A few habits help both you and your client.

• Write the agreement down. Put the frequency, the amount, what is included and the notice period in a short contract or email that the client confirms.
• Describe the period on the invoice. A line such as Website maintenance, November 2026 makes approval easy and avoids questions about which month is being billed.
• Bill in advance for retainers. Reserved time is normally paid before it is used; that is what makes it a retainer.
• Review annually. If your prices change, edit the schedule and tell the client before the next invoice is created.
• End series on purpose. Set an end date or number of invoices for fixed-term contracts so billing stops exactly when the work does.

Using a schedule for instalments

A recurring schedule is also a tidy way to split one large fixed-price job into equal instalments. A kitchen renovation, a year-long marketing campaign or an expensive custom software build can be invoiced in, say, six monthly parts. Set the series to end after six invoices and describe each line as Instalment of the agreed project price, so every document stands on its own.

Milestone billing is different: the amounts depend on phases being finished rather than on dates passing. For milestones, send individual invoices when each phase is approved, or convert an accepted quote into an invoice at every stage. Recurring schedules suit predictable, calendar-based payments; milestones suit deliverables.

Recurring revenue makes cash flow predictable

Irregular income is one of the hardest parts of running a small business. A month with three big projects is followed by a quiet one, and rent, software bills and salaries do not wait. Regular clients on recurring billing smooth that curve, because you know in advance roughly what will be invoiced next month and when it should arrive.

Many service businesses track this as monthly recurring revenue: the total of all repeating invoices, converted to a monthly figure. You can work it out from a CSV export of your schedules and invoices. Even a rough number helps with decisions such as hiring a subcontractor, saving for tax, or accepting a lower-paid project that fills a gap. The more of your income sits on predictable schedules, the calmer those decisions become.

Changing a series without breaking it

Agreements evolve. A client adds a second website to the maintenance plan, your rates rise in January, or the billing contact changes. Edits to a schedule apply to the invoices it creates afterwards; invoices that were already sent stay exactly as they were, because they are part of your records and your client's.

For a one-off extra in a single month, such as a rush job or additional hours, it is usually cleaner to keep the series unchanged and either add the extra line while reviewing that month's draft or send a separate invoice. Your client then sees the standard fee and the exception clearly, rather than a total that changes without explanation.

Recurring invoices for clients abroad

Prima Invoice supports any currency in the ISO 4217 list, with the right number of decimal places for each one: none for Japanese yen, two for US dollars or euros, three for Bahraini dinar. A series keeps its currency for every invoice, so an Australian client billed in AUD always sees AUD, whatever currency you use at home.

Taxes on recurring invoices are entered by you as a label and a rate, such as VAT 20% or GST 10%, and they repeat on every invoice in the series. Prima Invoice does not calculate country rules or change rates for you, so if a rate changes where you trade, update the schedule before the next invoice is created. A PayPal.Me link can even carry an amount and a currency code, for example paypal.me/YourName/25AUD, which makes paying in the right currency easy for the client.

Ending a recurring arrangement gracefully

When a contract finishes, end the series on the last billing date rather than deleting anything. The history stays in your account for reference and export, and the final invoice still gets its reminders until it is paid. A short thank-you note to the client alongside the last invoice leaves the door open for future work, which is worth more than any automation. A client who leaves satisfied may well recommend you to colleagues, and those introductions cost nothing to earn beyond good, dependable work.

Can you automate invoices in Excel?

A spreadsheet can calculate an invoice, and many people start there. Prima Invoice even offers free Excel invoice templates with working formulas on the templates page. What a spreadsheet cannot do on its own is wake up on the first of the month, create a new numbered invoice and email it to a client. Doing that inside Excel requires macros or scripts, which many companies block for security reasons, and which break quietly when a file is moved.

For a handful of invoices a year, a template and a calendar reminder are perfectly fine. Once you have several clients on regular billing, an account with recurring schedules is simpler and far less error-prone.

How other tools compare

Recurring invoices are widely available, and some providers include them in free plans. According to their pricing pages checked on 25 October 2026, Zoho Invoice lists Generate recurring invoices on its free plan, within a limit of 500 invoices per year, and Invoice Ninja's free plan lists Auto-Billing and Recurring Invoices for up to 5 clients. Refrens includes Recurring Invoices and Expenses from its Lite plan.

Prima Invoice keeps recurring invoices in Pro, together with reminders, status tracking, saved clients and products, and CSV export, with no cap on the number of clients beyond fair use. During Early Access, these Pro features are free for signed-in users. The planned price is on the pricing page.

Create your first recurring invoice

Sign in with your email address and set your time zone, currency and number pattern in your business profile. Add the client and the products or services you bill regularly. Then create the invoice, choose the frequency, the end rule and whether it should be sent automatically or saved as a draft, and save the schedule. The next invoice date appears straight away, and you can pause, resume or end the series whenever the agreement changes.

Want to see the invoice layout first? Build one in the free invoice generator without an account and download the PDF.